The following description relates to providing access to online marketplace services, for example, to allow sellers of property or merchandise to sell goods or items through an online auction. An online auction is an auction that occurs via one or more web sites in which people and organizations from all around the world can buy and sell goods and services. Among other goods and services, collectibles, books, jewelry, appliances, computers, tickets, sporting goods, furniture, equipment, vehicles, and vacation packages are listed on auction web sites, and bought and sold daily through the online auctions.
Participants in online auctions may include individuals, small companies, large corporations, or other types of organizations. In general, the term “organization” may refer to a company, enterprise, business, government, educational institution, or the like. The term “organization” can also refer to a group of persons, such as an association or society.
Some participants in online auctions may have business-to-business (B2B) relationships with other participants that may tend to focus on a vertical market, such as healthcare or automotive. Participants in a B2B auction can liquidate unwanted capital assets, dispose of excess inventory, and buy or sell equipment, goods, and services. Other participants in online auctions may have business-to-customer (B2C) or customer-to-business (C2B) relationships. A business may sell goods and services to the consumer market in a B2C online auction. In a C2B auction, consumers can determine what they're willing to pay for goods and businesses can decide whether or not to accept. Some other participants may have customer-to-customer (C2C) relationships, in which individuals can buy and sell goods and services with other individuals.
In one example of an online marketplace, eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif. provides online services in which buyers and sellers can browse, buy and sell various goods and services in a web-based marketplace. eBay provides online auction services, in which eBay typically may not directly handle or own the goods. Instead, eBay can facilitate the listing of the goods and services, like want-ads in a newspaper, and facilitate transactions of trading activities between buyers and sellers. Among other operations, eBay can provide listing features beyond what can be offered in a newspaper, such as a dynamic pricing structure.
Online auctions can offer a dynamic pricing structure where buyers can compete for the goods and services. The online marketplace can provide flexible selling features to allow sellers to use multiple product categories, various auction start and end dates, different branding and listing approaches, and multiple pricing formats, including different types of auctions. Some of the various types of auctions may include normal, dutch, reverse, lots, and others. In a dutch auction, for example, a seller may offer multiple copies of the same item, and the winning bidders pay the amount of the lowest winning bid. In a reverse auction, sellers can bid against each other to win a buyer's business. For example, Priceline.com Inc. of Norwalk, Conn. sells airline tickets, hotel rooms, and additional products based on the price the consumer is willing to pay.
The online marketplace may also provide a fixed-priced format for selling goods and services. For example, the online marketplaces of eBay, Amazon.com, Inc. of Seattle Wash. and Buy.com, Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif. provide fixed-priced selling, in which the seller offers goods at a fixed, predetermined price. The price of the good may be a factor of the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), and/or the price of the same good from other sellers.
Online marketplaces represent a sales channel—that is, an avenue for selling goods or services—that has become popular only recently. More traditional sales channels include “brick-and-mortar” storefronts, for example, a department store in which a good (e.g., a shirt) can be sold to buyers of the good. Other sales channels include catalog sales, door-to-door sales, and telemarketing sales. A seller may use multiple sales channels to sell its goods or services—e.g., retail stores and an online sale channel such as a web site with similar product offerings. In the case of an online sales channel, a seller may either set-up and maintain its own dedicated web-site that sells only its own merchandise or the seller may use an online marketplace web-site (e.g. eBay, Amazon.com or Buy.com) that sells merchandise owned by several different sellers. As used herein, “online sales channel” encompasses both dedicated, single-seller online sales channels as well as multiple-seller online sales channels.